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New Egyptian Short Film Depicts Ancient Egypt's Forgotten Queen Twosret

The last known pharaoh of Ancient Egypt's Nineteenth Dynasty, Queen Twosret, has been a subject of intrigue for historians and artists throughout history. She is believed to have ruled Egypt for seven years before a devastating civil war brought her reign to an end. The 'daughter of Re, beloved of Amun', as her royal name translates, served as an inspiration for Egyptian filmmaker Karim Moussa, who just released a short visual film starring socialite and model Zayneb Azzam and makeup artist Kiki Ismail, depicting Queen Twosret at the peak of her power.

"I wanted to highlight a story that not many know about; Queen Twosret was one of the few queens who ruled Egypt as a Pharaoh unlike Nefertiti, who was the queen consort of the Pharaoh Akhenaten," says Karim Moussa to CairoScene. "I wanted to recreate the queen's life through my perspective, imagining the challenges and fears of a woman holding such massive responsibility over a powerful civilisation."

Besides his undying passion towards visual storytelling, Moussa had other reasons driving him to endure the long process it took to bring the film to life, and the forefront of which is an emotion with a lot of bad rap.

"We have amazing history, and I always felt jealous seeing other countries create films about our civilisation while we lag behind," explains Moussa. "For example, seeing how the movie Cleopatra managed to depict our civilisation in a way that you can almost sense it in every aesthetic aspect of the movie is something that has always made me jealous but also inspired me."

However, producing a film of the same scale as big Hollywood productions isn't feasible with the resources available in Egypt, so Moussa reached out to the might of technology; shooting the whole movie with a green screen backdrop, and building up the visuals around it using advanced software."We have some amazing talents in Egypt, specially in filmmaking. Also, new computer technology is allowing us to reach higher levels of filmmaking and building imaginary worlds that we couldn't afford to do before. I wish to see more businessmen and production companies giving opportunities to local filmmaking projects. In no time, we'll see more projects and films coming out of Egypt and competing on an international level," concludes Moussa.